Afterglow

by Cherry Adair

  Paul gave a small signal, and the four men rushed forward to block her and Rand’s movements. Boxed in, they had no options. Dakota stayed where she was, despite Rand’s painful grip on her hips as he tried to move her out of the way.

  “What kind of father are you that you’d kill your own son?” she demanded, digging her shoes into the ancient stone floor for purchase.

  “The kind who never wanted a dependent, but caved because the bitch wanted a kid, and she held the purse strings. The more she loved him, the less I could tolerate either of them. Szik, come here,” Paul said without a hint of inflection, yet the hair on Dakota’s body rose and her blood ran cold.

  Seth Creed, powerful, award-winning Hollywood director, dropped to one knee beside Rand’s father. He started unbuttoning his shirt.

  Rand’s fingers gripped her waist so hard Dakota could feel his heartbeat in his fingertips. She could hardly breathe as she stared, transfixed.

  “Jesus,” Rand whispered as Creed’s shirt dropped to the uneven stone floor. From below his collarbone all the way into the waistband of his khaki slacks, his pale, hairless torso was covered with scars. Neat, systematic. Straight lines and small circles. Some old, some fresh.

  Paul had played a cruel, macabre game of tic-tac-toe all over him.

  Bile rose in the back of Dakota’s throat as Paul removed a lighter from the pocket of his robe and brought it to the tip of the cigar she’d forgotten he was holding. Rand’s hands slid from her waist, his arms circling her body, holding her hard against him. She strained to get free, to help Creed. To beat the living crap out of Paul. To puke. “My God! Don’t—”

  He lit and puffed. Lit and puffed. Checked the tip, then nodded to Creed.

  Head bowed, the director extended his left arm, palm up, bracing it on his bent knee.

  Rand’s arms were a steel corset around her ribs, cutting off her circulation and restricting her breathing. Nevertheless, she wasn’t capable of taking in air anyway, her vision reduced to a pinpoint on the tableau of the two men just feet away.

  Head cocked slightly, Paul looked down, clearly searching the mess of angry red and white scars before firmly applying the red-hot tip of the cigar to the inside bend of Creed’s elbow.

  The director neither flinched nor made a sound as his flesh sizzled. The sweet, sickly smell of burning flesh made Dakota gag. Black snow obliterated her vision, and she sagged in Rand’s grip. One second she was limp and nauseated; the next she was shoved hard, propelled toward Paul and Creed without warning. She crashed into them, landing hard in a tangle of arms and legs.

  One of them was heavy on top of her, and she lay on a man’s leg or arm. She couldn’t see anything, but all hell was breaking loose—shots fired, men yelling, the pounding of running footsteps, chaos. She didn’t know whether to cover her head, run and hide, or find her .38 and use those five damned bullets.

  She struggled to break free, shoving at Creed’s bare shoulder, seeing the deep slices and cigar burns on his skin up close and horrifyingly personal. “Get off, get off!” She shoved at his chest, trying to roll him off her midriff. He was a deadweight, and heavy as hell. Nearby she saw Paul’s broken glasses and his outflung arm. He wasn’t moving.

  She flinched as shots were fired; a man screamed. More shots. More shouts. Glass breaking. Metal hitting metal.

  She used every ounce of strength she had, and finally Creed flopped over like a dead fish. Panting, Dakota came up on her elbow beside him. She tried to make sense of what she was looking at. There was a large, gory hole where his head should be. She tasted bile and tried to scramble away backward like a crab. “Oh, my God, oh, my God!”

  Something incredibly loud exploded out of sight, and she flinched as she staggered to her feet. She slipped, righted herself, and saw that she was crouched in a glossy pool of bright red blood, which was spreading on the stone floor.

  HIS SICK FUCK OF a sperm donor wanted Dakota alive. Rand was expendable. Rand almost missed the subtle order to take him down as Paul and Creed performed their bit of theater.

  He’d seen a movement out of the corner of his eye and shoved Dakota the hell out of the way as one of Paul’s men tried to separate them. It was a split-second decision to get her away from him before he was attacked or shot at point-blank range. A through and through would seriously injure her, if not worse. He wasn’t taking any risks with her life.

  He’d thrown her a lot harder than he intended in his haste. With a shriek of surprise, she went barreling into Paul and Creed like a bowling ball into two pins. They all crashed to the floor.

  As the first guy reached for him, Rand grabbed the muzzle of his Uzi with one hand and shoved his palm directly up and into the man’s nose, wrenching the weapon out of his hands and breaking his nose at the same time. With the element of surprise on his side, he swung the butt of the submachine gun and used it to deliver a swift uppercut to the jaw. His opponent went down without a murmur.

  The next guy, big and rock-solid, grabbed Rand around the waist and tried to squeeze the life out of him. As he felt a rib crack, then another, Rand head-butted him. The guy just squeezed harder. There went another rib.

  Number three came up beside them, hit him on the side of the head with something fucking hard, and made him see stars. Rand fumbled the automatic into position in his numb fingers and popped him. At this close range, it was a very effective deterrent. Blood splattered on his face and chest. Three dropped to the floor. Out of the game.

  The man holding him in such a tight embrace stumbled over the body, and he was free. Rand stomped him. Not very effective in running shoes, but the man stayed down, looking dazed. Rand bent and grabbed his weapon.

  He heard the shot, felt something icy cold then fiery hot on his upper arm, and knew he’d been hit. Didn’t hurt.

  There were a hell of a lot more men in the room now, as the ones outside poured in to see what the commotion was about. Several converged on him at once, firing wildly. They were piss-poor marksmen, but even bad marksmen eventually hit what they were aiming at. The next man was firing as he ran. Number six came in from the left; number seven and eight discovered pretty damn fast how inaccurate the shots were when they were in motion.

  Shit exploded as they converged across the lab, firing wildly. Fragments of smashed glass flew, instruments clattered to the floor, and a stained-glass window shattered, rainbows of glass splintering once more on impact with the hard stone floor.

  Flashing a glance at Dakota, who was tangled up with Paul and Creed, Rand opened fire with his newly acquired Uzi. Six hundred rounds a minute. Range two hundred feet. He could take them all out in seconds. If the fuckers weren’t shooting back. He spun, squeezing off a barrage of bullets, attempting to drop as many as possible before they shot him.

  Number eight fell, eyes staring sightlessly at the domed ceiling. Six crumpled and lay still.

  His weapon was out of ammo. Rand tossed it aside and brought up the second. But before he could squeeze off a shot, there was a round of weapons fire from the sidelines.

  He brought the automatic up as more black-garbed men appeared out of nowhere. He was only ten feet from where Dakota had just struggled out from under the weight of Creed and Paul.

  He ran, yelling her name. Skidding to her side, he grabbed her arm and hauled her closer. Her clothes and hands stained with shiny red blood. “Are you hurt?” he demanded, even as he pulled her behind him, his attention fixed on the new arrivals.

  She was breathing hard. “Blood’s not mine.”

  “Good, that’s good,” he said, relieved, but now concentrating on the new threat. This batch looked a damn sight more professional than the others; this was serious firepower in the hands of men who knew what the hell they were about. Six of them, dressed from head to toe in unrelieved matte black.

  He squeezed off a shot. Click. Fuck.

  They were out in the open. Out of options. He reached back for Dakota’s .38. Point and shoot.

  One of the men yelled,
“Maguire?” even as he fired off two shots that struck the last two of Paul’s men as they fumbled to their feet. They both dropped.

  “Hot damn,” Rand said, wrapping his injured arm around Dakota. “The cavalry’s arrived.”

  The men moved around the lab with ruthless efficiency while Rand went to check on Paul and Creed. It was immediately clear that Creed had shot Paul point-blank and then turned the gun on himself, thereby putting a period to all Rand and Dakota’s unanswered questions. “Maybe we’re better off not knowing all the answers.”

  She leaned into his side. He stoically didn’t wince as his cracked ribs screamed for mercy. “We would’ve been better off not having any questions in the first place,” she said dryly, shoving her hair over her shoulder. Rand reached over and picked bits of glass and plastic out of the tumbled curls.

  A short, wiry man in his early forties approached them, and Rand automatically tensed. “Dr. North? What’s the protocol for incineration of Rapture?”

  Her face was pale and bloodstained as she told him, “It burns at eight hundred and fifty degrees, with no emissions of substances that pollute the air, water, or soil. If you can cremate the lab at that temp, you’ll be doing humankind a big favor.”

  The man’s lips twitched. “Yes, ma’am. We’ll take care of it. There’s a chopper outside waiting to take you to safety. As soon as you’re clear, we’ll make us a big old bonfire.”

  AND A FANTASTIC BONFIRE it was, Dakota thought, sinking back into Rand’s arms as the pilot circled the massive blaze. “Those poor, unsuspecting monks,” she whispered into the headset, as flames leaped hundreds of feet in the air and thick black smoke made the pilot warn they were going to make fast tracks out of there.

  Dakota was fine with that. She closed her gritty eyes, listening to Rand and the men who’d accompanied them discuss various methods of igniting explosives until their voices faded to black.

  NINETEEN

  They were on a private plane. A private plane with a bedroom and a bathroom in back. The last three hours passed in a kaleidoscope of events that Dakota knew would take a long time to unravel, let alone process. Right now she was too spent, too numb to even try.

  “Take a shower. Sleep,” Rand told her, his expression closed. Beyond the door between the aft cabin and the front cabin, half a dozen black-garbed men talked in low voices. She’d barely noticed them as she and Rand had been escorted to seats in the back to buckle up while the plane took off from a tiny airstrip somewhere in Greece. Before that, there’d been a helicopter ride.

  Once the plane reached cruising altitude, a guy came over to offer them food and drink. They both declined. They were both liberally covered with blood. None of the men seemed to mind that it got on the buttery soft, camel-colored leather seats. Another man showed her the bedroom with two narrow single beds in the aft cabin. Rand thanked him curtly, and went inside with her, his eyes scanning her face. “Are you sure you weren’t hurt?”

  “Positive. None of this is mine. You, on the other hand …”

  “I’m fine.” He put a hand on the door handle. “I’ll be right outside if you need me.”

  I need you in ways you can’t even imagine, she thought dully. “I don’t.”

  She stared at the solid surface for a moment after he shut it behind him, then gave herself a mental shake. She stepped into the tiny, beautifully appointed bathroom, and closed and locked the door.

  She took a too-quick shower to get the blood and dirt off her. She would’ve liked to stay in the tiled stall for the entire twelve-hour trip back to Seattle; she wasn’t sure if she’d ever be clean. But Rand pounded on the bathroom door what seemed like a second later. “You all right in there?”

  She twisted off the water. “Peachy,” she yelled, grabbing the towel off the rack and blotting her hair. She had no clean clothes, so she wrapped the towel under her arms before opening the door. He was standing at the foot of the bed closest to the tiny bathroom. He too had showered, but he’d been given clothes by their testosterone-charged hosts who’d swooped in and blown everything to hell on Mount Athos.

  He was barefoot, wearing dark pants and a body–hugging black T-shirt that showed off his abs, his biceps, and the long jagged scratch down his left arm, which looked as though it needed stitches. More scars.

  She looked from the angry cut on his forearm to the inscrutable expression on his face. “Pretty fancy plane, with two bathrooms.” And two, comfortable-looking, flat surfaces just feet away.

  “I’ll start off with an apology.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Only one?”

  His lips twitched. “These apologies come wrapped in batches of twenty.”

  She went to the head of the narrow single bed and sat down, then swung her feet up, crossed her ankles, and leaned back against a padded black-leather headboard. “Go ahead.” She tucked the loose end of the black towel over her knees, which were still wet. “Start anywhere you like. They don’t have to be in order of importance.”

  “There is absolutely no excuse for my lack of faith in you. None. But in my own defense, I had a couple of shit experiences in my early twenties. One, when a girlfriend made a pass at my father, and my mother paid her to break it off with me. That wasn’t trumped up—I was standing right outside the door when she took the money.”

  “Told to be there right then, no doubt, by one of your loving parents, as a sacrificial lamb.”

  “Yeah, in retrospect. Probably.” His deep, rich voice sounded raw, his control not as firm as it usually was. A muscle clenched in his unshaven jaw. She could feel the tension in him, but he didn’t reach for her, merely shoved his hands into his pockets.

  In contrast to his calm demeanor, the crackling intensity pulsing off him transmitted itself loud and clear. The small cabin wasn’t big enough for him, or what he was saying and feeling right then. Dakota knew he wanted to pace away the feeling churning inside him, but he was so controlled that no one else would’ve seen it. “We all betrayed you in our own fucked-up ways.”

  “True.”

  “The entire Maguire family owes you an apology,” he said thickly. “But since I’m it, I’ll speak for all of us.”

  “Don’t apologize for Paul… .”

  “No.” His nostrils flared, and he flushed along the blades of his cheeks as his eyes turned to slate. “I’ll apologize for myself. I was a dick.”

  “True,” she said again.

  “I should’ve trusted in you, and at least asked you about the PI’s findings. Let you tell me your version.”

  “Let me tell you the truth, you big jerk.”

  “Yeah. The truth would’ve gone a long way toward preventing all of what I put you through.”

  “It all boiled down to trust. You didn’t have it.”

  “I’ve learned from my enormous screw-ups, believe me.”

  “Frankly, I think you had cold feet before we got married,” Dakota said. “You wanted to believe all the lies you were fed, so it was easy to convince yourself that a report from a PI, with pictures, was the real deal.”

  “Believe me, I didn’t have cold feet. I loved you more than life itself, and your perceived betrayal derailed me. In a major way.”

  “It killed me that you believed your father over me,” she countered. “Worse, that you wouldn’t even listen to my side of the story.” She met his eyes and saw the pain he didn’t mask, and despite her own pain, felt his. Damn it, she didn’t want to be reasonable, or let him off the hook. But if she wanted to dream of a future with him, they had to deal with the nightmare of the past.

  “I had no idea that your mother had hired a PI to spy on me. Nor could either of us have possibly known that Seth Creed would hire actors to play all the parts that convinced her that I was exactly what she’d been telling you I was.” She waited for him to sit on one of the beds, but he remained where he was, hands stuffed into his front pockets.

  “At the time, I had to force myself to get over it. Had to remind myself that your
relationship with Paul was precarious at best before your mother’s death. Worse after. Then compounded by the loss of your mother.”

  It was his turn to raise a brow. He did it much better than she did. He’d had practice. “Are you defending my dickwad actions?”

  “I’m helping you move along,” Dakota said reasonably. “How many batches of twenty apologies do you have? If this is only number one, we need to speed things up. It’s only a twelve-hour flight.” His eyes narrowed, and she said mildly, “That was a joke, Maguire.”

  He took one hand out of his pocket and squeezed his forehead as if his head was about to explode, then shoved his fist back.

  Dakota got up on her knees to close the gap between them, since he seemed incapable of doing it himself. Somehow along the way, she crawled right over the towel she’d been wearing. Rand’s eyes flared as she walked on the mattress toward him on her knees, naked. “Eventually I got it. You and your father had such an adversarial relationship, and you’d just started mending fences. You wanted to believe he wasn’t the man you’d grown up with, wanted to believe him incapable of murdering your mother. You believed he was innocent, because you wanted to believe in him again.”

  “Yeah. That. In a nutshell.”

  Dakota didn’t care about apologies, or explanations, or about rehashing their entire European extravaganza. There’d be plenty of time to do all that. Later.

  There was only one thing she had to know now. She tucked her fingertips into the waistband of his pants and gave him a little tug. “Hold off on those apologies. I have two questions for you.”

  “Shoot.”

  “A poor choice of words, all things considered,” she said with a small smile. “Do you love me?”

  “Do I love you?” he repeated incredulously, his face tight. His eyes flared with something savage as he took in her naked body and clinging wet hair, but he remained planted in place, hands fisted in his pockets. “I never stopped loving you.”